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Intel Ivy Bridge On Linux Properly Supports OpenGL ES 3.0

02-13-2013, 01:40 PM

Phoronix: Intel Ivy Bridge On Linux Properly Supports OpenGL ES 3.0

Intel HD 2500/4000 graphics on "Ivy Bridge" processors now officially support OpenGL ES 3.0 per the Khronos specification. Intel received early word that their conformance results have been certified...

Just a quick clarification: Intel isn't half a year late here with GLES 3.0 support, this is actually the very first batch of conformance results! Which means we're ahead of all the desktop blob guys for once with a fully open-source GL driver ;-)

/me sees great times ahead for mesa and opensource gfx

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Thr first GLES3-compatible driver was NVIDIA's blob, on Windows and Linux. It's not been certified because seriously, who gives a fuck? Certification from Khronos is worthless. There can still be oodles of performance issues or driver bugs you have to work around for your specific render paths. You still have to test real hardware/drivers; there's no way you can pretend that your game or app will work properly on all "certified" hardware.

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I am merely an outside observer, but I wonder whether my impression is correct, that progress in Directx is slowing down (due to more and more feature rich-/completeness)? If I am right, this could also mean a slowdown in new OpenGL versions, which in turn would allow for OSS drivers to catch up.

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I am merely an outside observer, but I wonder whether my impression is correct, that progress in Directx is slowing down (due to more and more feature rich-/completeness)? If I am right, this could also mean a slowdown in new OpenGL versions, which in turn would allow for OSS drivers to catch up.

In general this is true. For 2 main reasons:

1) Gaming is mostly based on Consoles in modern times and Consoles are still in the D3D9/OGL2.1 era. Modern D3D/GL4.x are not being fully used for the moment.

2) D3D11/Opengl4.x are fairly developed as you noted and while there is still plenty of room for improvement, this improvement will take far more time than in the past when 3D graphics was new ground...

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Ah I see, so I guess that this may change soon due to a new generation of consoles arriving on the market.

Probably not. There isn't anything in the upcoming consoles that hasn't been in PC cards for years. Most games have been sitting at XP/Vista quality simply because most hardware in customer's machines during the PC boom of the past eight years is from the XP/Vista days and not compatible with DX10/11 improvements or is simply too low-end to handle the latest DX tech and the few gaming engines that use it. Low-end/Mid-range cards with no so great performance and not much memory are the norm for most users on PCs and notebooks - especially outside of the US/UK and certain parts of Asia where it's common to see high-end PC builds - and only the high-end GPUs paired with large amounts of GDDR and a nice wide memory bus can really utilize the latest DX tech at high-resolutions. That's one big reason why Valve put out HL on Steam for Linux and hasn't put out HL2, as few Linux desktops and notebooks are packing anything above basic, low-end GPUs that can't handle the high-end tech or gaming engines.

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That's one big reason why Valve put out HL on Steam for Linux and hasn't put out HL2, as few Linux desktops and notebooks are packing anything above basic, low-end GPUs that can't handle the high-end tech or gaming engines.